The Kinship of Secrets

by Eugenia Kim

  39

  * * *

  The Charity of Secrets

  High above a soothing sea of clouds, the sisters flew across the Pacific. “How was it with Uncle last night?” Miran said.

  “Sad to remember things, and wonderful to feel his love again.”

  “Damn, that word comes out of your mouth with such ease.”

  “And you, too.”

  “What? Oh, the swearing. Don’t go all Mom on me now.”

  “I’m kidding. You were great. I don’t think you swore once even at the inn with just me.”

  “Something shifted, like I’d grown antennae tuned to the Korean station. My tongue got loosened somehow.” She laughed and flipped her braid at Inja. “But I guess as soon as we got out of Korean airspace that radio ran out of batteries.” Miran closed her science fiction book, The Farthest Shore.

  Inja wanted to give her something to unite her with a culture where it was common for parents to never say I love you. She wanted to give her a story that could demonstrate how the most precious commodities of love could be those that remained unspoken. She turned to her and said, “Being in that house and the yard with the willows reminded me about something I want to tell you.” She told her the secret of Halmeoni’s feet—of how the winter that Halmeoni had carried food in the snow and ice to their imprisoned mother had forever damaged her feet—and she knew Miran would keep this from their parents, their mother, as easily as she had, out of a love whose unlimited reach she would no longer think to measure.

  Miran was thoughtful a long while, then riffled the pages of her book. “I didn’t even know we had secrets until you told me we did, and every time another one pops up, I look at Mom differently. I see more of her, because I see more of where she came from.”

  Inja agreed. She also kept to herself her great regret that Miran never knew their steadfast grandmother. They had come from a long line of holding back, suppressing hurtful truths to clear the passageway of old burdens. And to the extent Grandmother could—even across the dividing ocean, as her mother had with the packages—she worked to line that passageway only with devotion. Grandmother never once mentioned her six lost children to Inja. And perhaps there were other secrets held by Grandmother’s own mother, shrouded by necessity, and unknown yet intuited, from whom this pattern had derived to become a habit. It had become a way to live in the accumulation of a difficult family history, a way that was a profound expression of love.

  “It changes how I look at myself, too,” Miran said. “Based on how easily I reverted to swearing, the language affinity isn’t going to last much longer.” She smiled. “But everything I saw, smelled, everything I heard, and meeting our relatives—our sweet uncle who was your father for all those years, our adorable cousins—it fills a side where there used to be a vacuum.” Her eyes held a clarity that smoothed her features. “Now Mom’s not alone on that side where there was only the unknown. I was resentful of that unknown, but that vacuum is filling, and I don’t see it as being one side or another that I have to choose.”

  “Exactly.” Inja touched her arm. Their mother had made a choice to love an unwanted, abandoned baby. And in an act of love for Grandmother, she’d made a choice between two daughters, to bring the adopted one with them to America. It had engendered fifteen years of her parents’ guilt, regret, and pain that was mentioned only once—that night of the blizzard. Her father never spoke of it. Perhaps in those years, her mother looked at Miran and saw only the consequences of her choice, and it had tainted the love between them. This choice had been forced on Inja herself, and the resulting reunion had caused grief and unending yearning, which, as proven by this trip, would always be a part of her. Just as Miran now understood she didn’t have to choose between two cultures, there was no need for Inja to choose between her two families. She could never repair what was lost, but she could celebrate what was gained in the middle ground.

  She said to Miran, “Perfectly phrased,” and their eyes caught in a radiance of kinship.

  Miran opened her book, and Inja turned her gaze to the window. Upon arrival in Seoul, after they had landed and were packed into the car with Uncle and Seonil, Elder Hwang had observed how much the same yet how different the sisters were—how different Miran was. She exuded a foreignness that went beyond her physical differences with Inja. Her features were Asian but lacked the subtle markings of Korean homogeneity in the way that Inja knew she was home the moment they stepped into the airport’s busy customs area. She felt the same a little later among people crowding the airport and out on the streets—an indescribable sensibility of Korean not only embodied in language and sound, but in how one smiled, a mere turn of the shoulders, a particular sweep of wrist and hand, a sense of dignity, space, and carriage. Having been away and freshly returned, she could see in the sea of strangers how their entire sense of being, beyond the physical similarities, expressed a shared history and culture that was comforting—and simultaneously uncomfortable. She knew the discomfort came from having spent ten years in a nation where independence and individuality were prized, a country that invented such phrases as personal space, do your own thing, let it all hang out, and it’s who I am.

  The comfort of being home, her Korean home, came from fulfilling the drive to belong. But this drive also heightened the pain of division when a single small thing marked one as different, such as Inja having a mother but not having a mother; for Uncle, having her as a daughter who was not his daughter; for Miran, being Korean yet not being Korean; and for her parents, having the eldest who was not the firstborn blood child. No matter how enviable it may have been to have had a mother in America, Inja had been singled out when war had already made threadbare the things that bound the Korean people in common. Perhaps it was her legacy, but Miran had always treaded between belonging and not belonging, and it had destroyed her sense of comfort, denied her the surety of belonging and its gifts of pride and loyalty.

  Inja had regarded her first months in America as being ripped from comfort, torn from the powerful homogeneity of the Korean people born of their long history and core traditions, a history and tradition preserved and adapted over centuries to reinforce itself. One of the reasons Najin had treated her as a baby when she first arrived was her mother’s instinct of protection, having known how disorienting a transition it was—and one she herself had sacrificed in order to preserve her Koreanness for when Inja would be reunited with her. In recalling her first car ride in America, Inja had taken note of her father’s careless and effortless switching from English to Korean and back again, as being the habit of an integrated man who successfully straddled the line, and one she’d sworn to—and did—achieve, at least in language.

  Bands of orange and cobalt met at the gilded horizon of high altitude, a vista that had greeted her now three times on passages across the Pacific. The cold cabin air chilled her neck, and the pain of her first flight from Korea resurfaced. She would always have that pain no matter where inside she tried to hide it, just as her mother would always have her own scars from the decision she made that caused their years of separation, even after their reunion. But Inja had learned the charity of secrets. Grandmother’s refusal to divulge the cause of her frostbite was the example she had tried to follow in hiding her misery—though she wasn’t entirely successful—upon arriving in America. Her father never once expressed the grief of not knowing what had happened to his parents. And who knows what untold secrets lay between her mother and Grandfather, and her uncle and Grandfather, that had led to their sharing the dream from his grave? Above all, it would be charity to safeguard Miran from the secrets strewn behind her.

  With her sister close by in proximity and heart, Inja examined the deepest recesses of her mind and soul, and confirmed her instinct that truth was not always the sole path to compassion, the way to redress criminal wrongs. For now, she would not tell Miran the secrets of her birth. But she had learned from this trip that change happens with the slip of a word—Uncle’s mention of Mira
n’s father—and one’s view of the past and future were mutable. She didn’t have to decide what should be secreted forever; she could be open to whatever was ahead in their sisterhood.

  Uncle had altered the story of Najin’s departure from Inja into an act of supreme love, and it had taught her the need to attest and affirm rather than to criticize. Najin, too, had altered the story of the widow’s abandonment of Miran as one that expressed a final act of a mother’s love for the betterment of her child. Inja and Miran had grown to encompass this love even as their histories were revised with the last secret revealed. The cycle of secrets and growth would expand every time Inja flew across the separating ocean to give back the love she’d been given on each farthest shore.

  Miran’s dozing head grazed Inja’s shoulder. She shifted so the concave of Miran’s neck and chin would rest against the convex curve of her shoulder. Outside the red and purple sky faded into night, and the cabin lights dimmed. In time, she would once again sit at her mother’s kitchen table to hear her stories. She would join her father in his passion for space missions, rejoicing with him in the discoveries of their expanding universe. She would, in silence but through her actions, embrace her role as the eldest daughter for her parents, her uncle, aunt and cousins, her sister, for all her family.

  Author’s Note

  When I was very young, my family gave presentations at civic clubs and to church groups to educate Americans about a little-known war, in a small unknown country, that lasted from 1950 to 1953. The presentations were intended to raise funds and receive clothing donations for refugees—and for our own family members in Korea who survived those years of carnage. Five of us children, from ages one to nine, wore Korean dress, sang Korean nursery songs, and displayed Korean dolls, baskets, and lacquer boxes. Another child remained in Korea, cared for by my maternal grandparents and uncle. My bilingual father, Jacob Siungtuk Kim, pointed to a big map and described the invasion by the communist North Korean People’s Army—supported by the Russians— into democratic South Korea, supported by the United States and the young United Nations.

  For many years afterward, I helped my mother, Alice Hahn Haekyung Kim, ship packages to Korea, filled with donated clothing and simple necessities made scarce by war: soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste, chicken bouillon, powdered milk, baby powder, fabric, pencils and paper, and luxuries such as hairpins, raisins, canned pineapple, DDT insect spray, air freshener, candy. Sitting on the floor surrounded by goods going to Korea, I slid gummed tape over a wet sponge in a saucer to seal the brown-paper-wrapped packages and pressed down on the twine for my mother to knot it tight.

  About fifty years later, I found my father’s tattered maps and my mother’s diaries, where she listed everything she sent overseas. I knew my parents had come to America in 1948—two years before the North Korean invasion—but it was only while researching this novel that I fully understood my father’s role in the American occupation of South Korea prior to the Korean War.

  The origins of the Korean War occurred long before the conflict flamed to life on June 26, 1950. In 1910, after decades of political and military maneuverings, Korea was annexed by Japan until 1945. The unwelcome colonization grew harsher as Japan invaded Manchuria, China, then several countries in the Pacific Islands during World War II.

  In 1936 my father had managed to depart from Japanese-occupied Korea to attend an American seminary, while my mother, newly married, planned to follow him in a few months to study obstetrics, once her papers were secured. But soon after my father left Korea, Japan closed its borders to and from the West, and my mother was stranded without her husband for what would become nine years. After the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II, my mother was imprisoned for ninety days by the Japanese, because her husband in America was suspected of being a spy. He would not learn of her suffering until they were reunited.

  By 1943 America’s involvement in World War II had helped to turn the tide against the Axis forces, and the Allied powers began to discuss the final settlement of the war, including the war in the Pacific. Around this period, my father worked in America for the OSS, the U.S. military intelligence services and precursor to the CIA, as a translator of Japanese, Korean, and written Chinese. The “Korea problem” was first discussed in depth at the Cairo Conference, November 22–26, 1943, attended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of Nationalist China. These leaders declared that Japan would be stripped of all lands “which she has seized or occupied since the beginning of the first World War in 1914,” including those stolen from the Chinese, and “all other territories which she has taken by violence and greed. The aforesaid three great powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent.” The sticking point for ultimate Korean independence was “in due course.”

  At subsequent summit conferences, Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union joined Roosevelt (followed by Truman) and Churchill to consider possible Soviet involvement in the Pacific theater. Stalin agreed to the principles of the Cairo Declaration on the “Korea problem,” and, following other negotiations, the partitioning of Korea at the thirty-eighth parallel was determined at the Potsdam Conference, July 17–August 2, 1945. The decision to draw the line at that latitude rose from the American belief that they could not militarily cover the entire peninsula of Korea, while Russia could easily advance from northern positions in Manchuria and China. By then it was inevitable that the Japanese would be defeated, though it was still a matter of when. This summit yielded an ultimatum to the empire of Japan that it would face “prompt and utter destruction” if it would not surrender. Japan refused the ultimatum, and President Truman dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6. Russia entered into war with Japan on August 8 and, as outlined in the Potsdam Declaration, moved troops into the northern half of the Korean peninsula above the thirty-eighth parallel.

  The substantial threat of Russian Allied involvement against the Japanese and the second atomic bomb at Nagasaki on August 9 prompted Japanese emperor Hirohito’s unconditional surrender on August 15, 1945. My father recalled he was with a few Korean colleagues in New York City when he heard this announcement on the radio, and everyone wept. My mother recalled seeing American B-29s flying in clear skies above Seoul. “Sweet silver birds,” she called them, dropping leaflets that declared the liberation of Korea from Japanese rule.

  My father was determined to return to his homeland to find his wife and joined the U.S. Army as a translator, given the rank of civilian field officer. Though the first U.S. forces landed on September 8 in the southern half of the Korean peninsula, the army’s circuitous route for my father’s transport got him to Korea sometime in October. The day he landed at Gimpo Airport, he was reunited through miraculous coincidences with my mother in Seoul. My father was translator for General John R. Hodge, who led the American occupation of South Korea. General Hodge knew nothing about Korea and was hostile to communism. As such, he was unwilling to cooperate with Russia as originally outlined in the Potsdam Declaration. Both the American and Soviet “trusteeships” were intended to relieve the nation of thirty-five years of Japanese colonization, but the radically opposing ideologies of occupied North and South Korea came to exemplify the divisions of the burgeoning Cold War.

  During the first five years of postwar reconstruction in Korea, tensions increased between the United States and USSR, along with communist China. The young United Nations, under control of the United States, focused on creating a democratic independent state in South Korea, while Stalin worked to stabilize Chinese-communist versus Soviet-communist factionalism in North Korea.

  In May 1948, South Korea established the democratic Republic of Korea (ROK), and presidential elections resulted in a new constitution intended for all of Korea. The U.S.-favored presidential candidate, Syngman Rhee, who
was a staunch proponent of total unification, was elected. My father’s post with the military ended, and in June he and my mother, with two of their three children in tow, traveled by ship to America. They planned to stay about two years and had left the middle child behind, both as a guarantee to my maternal grandmother they’d return, and because traveling with three children was arduous. The eldest at three was old enough to know if she were to be left behind, the youngest was a newborn boy, so the middle daughter, who was one and could be weaned, was left with her grandparents and her uncle and his wife.

  A month later in July, North Korea instituted the communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) under the leadership of anti-Japanese guerrilla hero Kim Il-Sung, who was favored by Stalin. The thirty-eighth parallel border between North and South Korea became more intractable proportionate to the increasing postwar ideological differences between the superpowers and their battle to attain supremacy in nuclear arms.

  In North Korea from 1948 to 1950, factionalism and non-communists were quashed. Meanwhile, a number of bloody leftist uprisings in South Korea led Stalin to believe that further agitation south of the parallel could be encouraged and that unification under the DPRK could be achieved. Also, Truman was unwilling to commit to long-term military support of South Korea for fear that Rhee would employ those troops northward toward ROK unification. The ROK military remained dependent on the United States and were seen as weak and vulnerable. The charismatic General Douglas MacArthur, who was the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers stationed in Japan, and the British Foreign Office both stated that they believed the whole of Korea would be communist-controlled in a decade’s time.